di Charles Klopp
This handsome book edited by Antonio Lucio Giannone and Fabio D’Astore contains the Acts of a conference held at the Castello Ducale Castromediano in Cavallino near Lecce in 2012 (for the castle see https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palazzo_Castromediano_di_Cavallino and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dN14tQEkZfA). It is illustrated with color and black and white plates and contains twelve essays by different hands plus some celebratory front matter.
Since the 1995 centennial of the death of Sigismondo di Lymburgh-Castromediano (1811-1895), Duke of Morciano and Marchese of Cavallino, there has been a flurry of scholarly activity regarding him. Much of this has been carried out under the auspices of the Centro Studi “Sigismondo Castromediano e Gino Rossi,” the sponsor of this volume. In 2010, the Centro brought out a volume of Acts from an earlier Convegno (I Castromediano di Lymburg e il loro archivio: primi interventi e prospettive, ed. Rosellina D’Arpe); in 2013, a diary by the Duke (Sigismondo Castromediano, Diario [1847-1851], edited by Giovanna Rosato); and a volume by Alessandro Laporta of collected essays (Il duca bianco di Cavallino. Nuovi contributi).
The White Duke (an epithet Castromediano owed to the head of prematurely white hair he acquired during more than eleven years in Bourbon prisons) is best known for his volume of prison memoirs, Carceri e galere politiche: Memorie del duca Sigismondo Castromediano, which was published in two volumes in 1895-96. This work has been reprinted twice (in 2005 and again in 2011) by the Centro Studi in a photostatic edition. It is now available in the HathiTrust digital Library online at https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/005919858. Recent years have also seen the publication of a “Regesto” of Castromediano’s letters edited by Fabio D’Astore (“Mi scriva, mi scriva sempre…” Regesto delle lettere edite ed inedite di Sigismondo Castromediano, Lecce: Pensa, 1998) as well as a fictionalized biography by the journalist and Italian Senator, Giuseppe Giacovazzo. Giacovazzo’s book centers on Castromediano’s long, passionate, but never consummated love affair with the Turinese Baroness Adele Savio di Bernstiel. It is based on letters between the two correspondents plus diaries and other material, as well as Giacovazzo’s own speculations about what his characters might have been feeling and even letters that they might have written but didn’t (Giuseppe Giacovazzo, Adele. La storia d’amore del Duca Castromediano, Bari: Palomar, 2007).
